My thinkfest on branding continues, and has ballooned outward to encompass so much more. This isn’t (just) about a brand. This isn’t pure self-promotion. It’s turned into a giant gulping fiesta of Potential On The Internet.

One of the words that has come up in every list of “What I would write about” is content. What a ridiculous and unspecific word. Content, however, took on a new sparkling life after I attended MinneWebCon and heard Kristina Halvorson speak about content strategy. Yes, strategic content! I say “content strategy” at work and I watch eyes glaze over, so I have to shovel the pure galvanized excitement out of my head and straight into their imaginations.

Crap content and you’re nothing. It’s not just true on the web. It’s been true throughout time, and we’re at a point in time where more content is being generated and consumed than ever before.

I just ran to my bookshelf and pulled down Daniel Pink’s “A Whole New Mind,” which jolted my fuzzy brain back onto the road of clarity in 2007 and has stuck with me. Pink defines six “senses” on which “professional success and personal satisfaction increasingly will depend”:

1. Design (not just function)
   
2. Story (not just argument)
   
3. Symphony (not just focus)
   
4. Empathy (not just logic)
   
5. Play (not just seriousness)
   
6. Meaning (not just accumulation)

I have these six “senses” tacked up at my workspace. These points, to me, are the soul of content, of what content can be and how we use it and make it good.

Does all content need these things? Do content need all these things? I think they can act as sliding scales: some content demands more story (journalism is a clear example, or it would fall apart), some demands more play and design (the IKEA instructions for bookshelves, with the little man and his idea lightbulb).

Content through the lens of the six senses can be astonishing. It’s the root of good movie plots, of books that keep you up to get surprised by 2am. It’s the discussions that makes time at once stand still and fly by. It moves you to spur on the six senses in yourself, to get up and write a blog post and concoct amazing plans.

O-content! Honorable content! You will be uncontained and destuffed!

For those blanking on their modernist poetry, the nickname is taken from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” which I adore and makes me cry. Same with the blog title – An Overwhelming Question. However, look at this blog. It’s not about poetry. It’s not about me crying (often). It’s not about the ocean, or eating peaches, or literature (often) or any of that. Plus silentseas sounds passive. “Silent” is pretty much the last adjective that would ever be used to describe me.

At MinneWebCon last month, the Geek Girls had a joke: you know how long you’ve been on Twitter by how professional your handle is. The current trend is towards having a handle that reflects your real name; your name is your brand in many cases. But my name, and not getting down on my folks here, is very common. My nickname is my initials, also taken. I continue to stalk Twitter accounts related to my name, hoping against hope they’ll go dormant for 9 months and I can swoop in screaming “MINE MINE MINE.” Man, I can’t wait to be professional on the internet.

This rolls me into another issue: what do I want to write about? I want to write more, and not just reviews of books I’ve read, which is what this blog has largely turned into. Watch out, bullet points:

Things I would like to write about

• Web content and design
• Education
• Crafty things (Knitting, DIY)
• Baseball
• Japan
• Minnesota/The Midwest
• Travel

That is a pretty broad list with some pretty broad topics. Now, some of those things I don’t think I’d be that good at writing on. Baseball, for instance. I don’t have a head for stats, but I love the Minnesota Twins. But what if the Twins get into the post season, and I want to yammer somewhere about it, but I’m running a blog about content development?

The answer could be multiple blogs. The answer could be a better tagging system. The answer could be different Twitter accounts. There are a lot of answers, though I need to ask the right questions.

More to come!

The Tidal Basin, surrounded by blooming cherry trees, with the Washington Monument in the background. We saw the blossoms on the first full day we were in town, and it turned out to be the last nice day to see them – a storm rolled through that night and took the rest off the trees for the season.

We saw many presidential monuments and memorials, but the Roosevelt memorial was hands-down the most moving. Here is a statue of FDR and his dog, Fala.

The Library of Congress was completely astonishing. We spent an entire morning there, though we passed on the tour, finding the extremely thorough pamphlets and interactive displays able to answer our questions so we could move at our own pace.

Eliot (left) and Clive (right). Clive has more white on him. They greatly enjoyed posing together, even if Eliot annoyed Clive often.

Clive (“Clive Allen Anderson,” or “Clive as in Barker?” – though neither Barker nor Anderson are my family’s last name) was a Humane Society gem, the kind of cat that has forever brought my family joy through their uniqueness and unpredictability. He was always on the tiny side; there is a photo somewhere of him curled up and sleeping in a ball as a kitten, the same size as the 3-inch floppy disk next to him for scale. A tabby-backed cat with a white underside, we suspect he was a Siamese build under the coloring. It was either the diamond-shaped head, or the way he could glare with such disdain at other pets in the way tabbies usually seem incapable.

My father often makes “pelt inspections,” talking to our cats about the state of their fur and how it would rank on a scale. Clive’s pelt was fabulous, and he was remarkably soft, leading Dad to tell him that the Smithsonian was very interested in archiving him for future study. Strangely, that Smithsonian call was one of the first things I thought about when my parents told me that Clive, at 12 years old, was nearing his end. He’s going to be put down later today.

Clive and Eliot cram into a tiny cat bed. They usually slept here together.

There was a brush with mortality about 2 and a half years ago, when I was re-acclimating to the US and my parents were (of course) out of town. Clive had been seeming… not himself, and Chris and I made the call to bring him into the emergency vet, which was terrifying and a heartbreak; we had just put our family dog down a few weeks prior, and I was not in any kind of shape to lose my little cuddle-friend. Fortunately, his kidneys were spotted as an issue, and he came back to us in much higher spirits, though remained on the lighter side (6-7 pounds as opposed to his usual 9-10 pounds) for the rest of his days. Injections of fluid with different frequency helped him (and were an amusing challenge for my family), and we had extra years with him that we wouldn’t have otherwise. Chris brought this up last night while I was crying my eyes out, about how my being an “excellent cat-mom” to Clive when he needed me helped both him and my family.

I don’t wan’t any links to the Rainbow Bridge poem, or other schmaltz. I’ve read them, and the honest way I take comfort in incidences like this (besides red-faced sobbing) is thinking of the joy in my life that would not have been if Clive wouldn’t have been with us. How blessed are we to have pets like these, with their love, comfort, companionship, and antics. There is very little in life that tops the company of an excellent cat.

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26. Twilight – Stephanie Meyer
What can I say here that hasn’t already be said? Meyer is a hack (but a rich one, now), Bella Swan is a Mary Sue that would make teenage fanfic writers turn up their noses, Edward Cullen is damn creepy. I can say this book was disturbing. Having seen a friend go through the pure terrifying shit that comes with getting out of an emotionally abusive relationship, it turned my stomach over to read about the one between Bella and Edward, and see it portrayed as an ideal. Also, this book is a kind of creepy piece of abstinence propaganda. Remember, girls: if you let your boyfriend snog you, he’ll freak out and impregnate you with a bizarre half-breed lovechild that will start to devour you from the inside and will have to be prematurely bitten out of you. Oh, sorry, that’s in book four, which I never got around to reading. Also, the vampires in this book aren’t vampires… they’re crappy X-Men.

27. The City of Ember - Jeanne DuPrau
Much like Uglies last year, this was 2008′s fab young adult dystopian escape novel. I enjoyed this as much for itself as I did knowing how into this book I would have been in elementary school. Scarcity-ridden tiny community on the verge of being extinguished, and two intrepid kids find clues to escape left behind by the community designers. Really, really excellent adventure romp, and a quick read. I didn’t see the reviewer-panned movie; think I’ll let my mental image of Ember rule this one.

28. Real World – Natsuo Kirino
While in college, I read Kirino’s “Out,” and was blown away by the “why-dun-it” structure of the mystery. This book didn’t have quite so much of a mystery behind it at the end, and I was a bit let down. Kirino’s slow-build style was still really interesting to read, and I may give it another shot at a certain point, but I’d recommend “Out” as a first read for her instead of this.

29. Sleep Toward Heaven - Amanda Eyre Ward
Oh no, another book I read in a few days over a year ago and have mostly forgotten. A parallel-storyline novel of three women… and there’s a prison…? And a doc… tor? Oh man, I need to write these reviews earlier.

30. The Hot Zone – Richard Preston
This isn’t even really book 30, because I didn’t finish it. I couldn’t finish it. I am one of the most paranoid people ever when it comes to my health, though mostly in my own head. I have no problems riding public transport, or touching door handles, or things like that. However, when I start to feel sick, my head kicks into overdrive. A pain in my toe isn’t the weird hangnail, it’s foot cancer. A patch of dry skin is actually toxic epidermal necrolysis. WebMD was made to freak people like me out, and I can’t read it. So this book was just a nightmare trip for my subconscious and I had to just put it down and leave it be. Slight headache? Either a long day without caffeine or I was going to start gushing black stuff out of my eyes, because I was the new Patient Zero. Nightmare stuff, holy crap.

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That’s it for 2008! Holy nuts, 2009 reviews are coming along shortly. My goal is to get all of those things done by March.

21. Ragtime – E.L. Doctorow
This is a book that I shelved a million times while working at a used book store. It always seemed to hit my daily pile, making me assume that it was some kind of massive but passing trend book, but my interest remained piqued. It emerged on a reading list for Urban Studies and I decided to give it a go; much to my delight, it was great. Not only do you have Bob Everyfamily wandering their way into the sparkle-shiny 20th century, but they seem to encounter every famous person who was alive at the time.

22. Bel Canto – Ann Patchett
HOSTAGES! Also, opera. Also, the ever popular unnamed South American Country. Guerrilla terrorists take over a highfalutin government shindig with plenty of foreign visitors for ransom… and then they get to know each other? While I was reading this, it felt like there was a huge slow-down, a languid slide of time that took me in with it. I wasn’t complaining, the story was moving along, but I was in as much of a time-slip as the characters seemed to be. “How long,” I asked myself, “is this book?” I was blown away to find that I’d read over 100 pages in an afternoon without even realizing it. The ending rocked me, and this book is definitely not as it appears.

23. Fables books 1-8 – Bill Willingham
I haven’t been a weekly comic reader in… well, ever. I’ll wait for trade paperbacks, or borrow already-completed stories and read through them that way. I was at my friendly local comic/game/everything store and was rummaging around for something new and the clerk muttered, “Um, a lot of chicks like Fables.” I’m glad my white blinding rage didn’t deter me from the books, and in 2008 I read through the first 8 collected books of the series like I couldn’t get enough. Basic, basic premise: the storybook and nursery rhyme characters of legend (calling themselves Fables) have fled their homes, which have been overrun by a menacing and mysterious Adversary, and have now taken up secret residence in a section of New York City they have dubbed Fabletown, and a farm upstate for those Fables who can’t pass as human (think the Three Pigs, or Reynard the Fox). For those of you poor suckers who still think that comics are just kiddie picture books, not only are you living in a wet hole of sad, you’re missing out on one of the great modern stories of the last decade. Willingham hits every genre square on the head and then rumbles for more; with such a dynamic cast at his disposal, every note rings clear. I haven’t cried over a long story like this since Sandman, and Fables has made me a weekly comics reader, much to my delight. Books 1 and 2 are being published as a jumbo-mega edition, which is what I would suggest new readers start out with; it gives you the first two big storylines, and a generous peek at the massive crazyquilt underneath it all.

24. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
Yes, from one of my favorites of the year (Fables made the top 5), to hands down one of the worst. I saw this book on some list, a “What book club book changed your life” roundup, and decided to give it a go. Strange coming of age story in an elite college setting? Someone dies? They speak Greek and Latin? I like snooty, sign me up. What a mistake. This book was tortuously bad, and instead of just, you know, selling it back to the bookstore, I kept on reading. I was determined that if I gave up, then this book would win. Also, I was waiting to see if the book would ever redeem itself. Alas, no. A young man utterly void of personality transfers to a New England School of Prestige, to fall in with the “weird” and “nerdy” and “strange” clique who study the classics. He becomes desparate to emulate them and become one of them, even though they show no traits to classify themselves as interesting. They love to ignore him, and because it’s in first person, you’re stuck with this crap-ass whiner while he freezes his ass off in some kind of barn over the winter while the rest of the Fabulousness goes off to Rome. Everything is very dramatic for them, and then someone dies, and nobody really cares? Ever? UGH, even rehashing this makes me annoyed. I kept thinking I was missing something, that there was some key point that I just wasn’t picking up on… and maybe there is, but I have a negative amount of desire to go back and find it. Incidentally, I still have a copy of this book on my shelves, just so that when people ask about it, I can remember to tell them never to read it.

25. The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
I think I was so wound up and angry from The Secret History that it clouded my memory and my judgment (see upcoming book #26, Twilight. AAARGH). I only remember vague parts of this book, mostly the stories within the story, but it’s all muddled up. I guess that’s what happens when you stick a book in the middle of a reading-rage sandwich, and then don’t review it for over a year and a half. Sorry, Margaret Atwood. I really liked The Handmaid’s Tale!

16. Water for Elephants – Sarah Gruen
A man recalls his time traveling with the circus, falling in love, and getting to know an elephant. Not particularly mind-blowing, but would be known in magazine roundups as “a good beach read.” Sarah Gruen wrote the draft of this book during National Novel Writing Month, where you churn through 50,000 words in 30 days over the month of November, which was an encouraging tidbit as I’ve failed to complete NaNoWriMo twice (but have always learned something from the process).

17. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – Jean-Dominique Bauby
This was on the top-five list, and I’ve shoved copies of it at a lot of folks I know. It is a short book, and I read through it in one evening. Bauby suffered a massive stroke and was in a coma, awaking 20 days later to be mentally aware of his surroundings, but physically paralyzed except for the ability to blink his left eyelid, suffering from “locked-in syndrome.” The prospect of this utterly terrifies me, and that Bauby was able to write the book in this state (an assistant would recite letters from a frequency-ordered alphabet, and Bauby would blink at the appropriate letter) is astonishing. More astonishing is the book itself, an absolute must-read memoir.

18. Don’t Know Much About Mythology – Kenneth C. Davis
I am perpetually aware of gaping holes in my knowledge set (particularly “canon” books that this English major has never read), and often seek quality “summary” books to fill the gap at least a bit. Davis examines mythology from around the world, and though he can’t touch equally on every culture (Native American myths are touched on, but not examined as closely as, say, those of the Greeks), he constructs a solid overview. This will be a good foundational lead-in for this year (2010), when I finally read some Joseph Campbell.

19. The Great Train Robbery - Michael Crichton
I love a heist. I love a heist. Every part of a heist story is awesome to me: how the mastermind decides to steal a thing, how he gets his group together, the group examining the impossible to overcome challenges, making multi-stage plans, the thrill of the early stage successes, complications! or betrayal!, sudden changes to the previously planned-out challenges, and finally the big job itself (and the fallout afterwards). Formula? Yes. Awesome? HELL yes. This book is everything that’s great about a heist story, has tons of great historical detail (it’s a fictionalized account of an actual robbery, hot damn), and there is even a badass movie with Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland.

20. Watchmen - Alan Moore
Reading Alan Moore’s work is not for the faint of heart, and any one of you gentle readers who dismiss them as “just a comic book” or get sniffy because they have pictures can get right out of here. Watchmen is long, intense, confusing, demanding, exciting, thorough, and more adjectives than I will subject you to. It was also completely worth it. I slogged through the first half, trying to piece together an alternate 1908s history with Nixon still in power, but I hit a point (namely Mars) when I couldn’t put the book down. The story began to kick me in the face and I needed to know what happened next. I wasn’t disappointed. I was disappointed in the movie; for all of the “look” of the book that it got right, the changed ending fell completely flat for me.

The Books of 2009 (in alphabetical order, can’t find the list I made as the year went on)

1. A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Hosseini
2. The Brief, Wondrous  Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
3. The Children of Men, P.D. James
4. Dogs in the Vineyard, L. Vincent Baker
5. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery
6. The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman
7. How The Irish Saved Civilization, Thomas Cahill
8. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
9. It’s The Little Things: Everyday Interactions that Get Under the Skins of Blacks and Whites, Lena Williams
10. The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness
11. Lamb, Christopher Moore
12. Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis
13. Lost Twin Cities, Larry Millet
14. The Magicians, Lev Grossman
15. The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss
16. The People of Sparks, Jeanne DuPrau
17. The Prophet, Khalil Gibran
18. Sabriel, Garth Nix
19. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Lisa See
20. Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marcia Pessl
21. The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
22. War for the Oaks, Emma Bull
23. World War Z, Max Brooks
24. The Years of Rice and Salt, Kim Stanley Robinson
25. The Zombie Survival Guide, Max Brooks
26. Comics I kept up on this year (Fables (incl. the crossover, 1001 Nights of Snowfall, and Cinderella), Unwritten, and Buffy Season 8)

Well damn, I’d love to just jump into reviews of a lot of these now. Here are some short lists to tide you over, gentle reader.

Winner of the Snow Flower and the Secret Fan Award:
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. This award is named after this book, because Mom was constantly foisting it my way saying “YOU HAVE TO READ THIS.” Other books have won this in the past; it is for books that Mom has foisted at me for over 1 year and I finally get around to reading. I am amused that the eponymous book won this year.

“That’s Not A Book, Cheater” List
Some of the books on the list are not strictly novels or non-fiction. However, if the quantity of reading is significant enough (by my own measure), I count them. Fair enough to let you know though. And I’m not a cheater, I just read many things.

1. The comics (If you think comics don’t count, then jump in a lake)
2. Lost Twin Cities. (Many historical pictures, but exhaustive research and writing about buildings torn down in the name of “progress” in Minneapolis/St. Paul. Masquerading as a coffee table book.)
3. Dogs in the Vineyard. (Actually a roleplaying game, but the setting was so fascinating and the system so interesting I read it cover to cover. I read many gaming books, but more often as reference, so they’re not on this list)
4. The Zombie Survival Guide. (I needed something to fill the need for more Max Brooks Zombie Talk after World War Z.)

Top Five of the Year:

• Children of Men
• World War Z
• The Magicians
• The Name of the Wind
  
• Special Topics in Calamity Physics

Reviews of remaining 2008 and all 2009 books coming soon. Probably some this evening, since I am blessed with a day off tomorrow and a not insignificant supply of caffeine this evening.

I mean, LOOK AT THAT. From the article: “This spiral then got bigger and bigger until it turned into a huge halo in the sky with the green beam extending down”  – AAAAAAAAAAAAA. The blog also helpfully puts up a video mock-up of spent rocket fuel being deployed in two directions and being back-lit by the soon-to-rise sun, but what rocket?! The Russians said they weren’t doing any tests. Someone had better own up to this – my tinfoil hat and I will be waiting for news updates.

On Monday evenings, my friend and I play racquetball. Due to the aforementioned stressful week (stressful month, really), I’d been unable to make it to the court for a while, and was really looking forward to playing. We have perpetual bad luck with the equipment room scheduling other events during our preferred time after work, and recently the racquetball club has arrived to force out all of the 5-6pm registration times. We could either reserve at 4:30 (directly after we’re out of work, and we’d be a half hour late while making our way to the gym anyway), or 5:30 (and who wants to wait around campus for an hour just to play racquetball? No thanks). We’ve opted for 4:30 and tried to make the best of it.

Monday was a bit of a storm, with my friend forgetting he had left his gym clothes at his desk on the other side of the river while already halfway along and having to turn back, to me getting transfixed by a baseball playoff game, so we were finally ready to go around 5:15. 15 minutes of reserved court time left? We could get in at least 1 solid game. Sadly, there were two men playing ball in the court when we got there. After they finished a volley, I knocked on the door and they came over.

“WHAT?” huffed the short, older man, while a younger boy (his son?) wavered around behind him. I said I was sorry, but we had the court reserved from 4:30 to 5:30 and were hoping to get in a game. “Well, you’re 45 minutes late, I think you’ve pretty much forfeited any right you had to this court. You wanna let us at least finish this game?”

I turned to my friend to see if he wanted to really play racquetball at all at this point, since we were so late. My glance must have been interpreted as some kind of hostile flare of feminine cunning, because the man completely lost his cool. “FINE, FINE, TAKE THE COURT. WE DON’T HAVE TO FINISH.” I yelled after him, “Hey man, we’re trying to figure out what to do here!” and he waved his hands in the air as he stormed away, still shouting, “NO NO! PLEASE! TAKE YOUR COURT BACK!” Ass! My rage did fuel me on to a racquetball victory, and I really hope I run into his puffing, ridiculous face again when we’re playing next week.

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Last night, while engaging in some knitting, I realized a hole had appeared in the scarf I was working on. Dropped stitch, damn. Not having a crochet hook, and not being sure about the best way to fix the thing, I resolved to zoom over to the nearest yarn store after my class and ask for help.

The store is in Cedar-Riverside, which is usually traffic hell, compounded by the fact that many people will cross the road at any given point or time, and stand in the middle of traffic in order to get where they’re going. When it’s dark and raining, this becomes even more exciting. I spotted a parking spot on the street in front of the store, and (after driving around for a few twisting blocks) came back around to find it still open. Score!

Check my mirrors, signal, and back into the spot. I go to open my door and find that another car has pulled up next to and in front of mine, and is going into reverse. He keeps reversing, and I beep the car horn to make sure he knows that there’s a car. He stops his car, but does not move it. I hop out, squeeze around his car, and he rolls down his window to yell, “LADY, WHAT IS YOUR PROBLEM?”

Totally flabbergasted.

Me: “I’m parking my car. I have parked my car. What’s wrong?”
Him: “Move your car.”
Me: “No! I parked my car here. I’m going to the store.”
Him: “Move your car. This is my space.”
Me: “It’s not your space, it’s my space. I’m parking here for now.”
Him: “I saw this space and I drove around the block and now I will park in it.”
Me: “Nobody was attempting to park in this space when I parked here. I have parked here. Now I am going to the store.”
Him: “WHAT THE HELL IS YOUR PROBLEM, LADY? MY GOD!”
Me: “I DON’T HAVE A PROBLEM HERE, SINCE I HAVE SUCCESSFULLY PARKED MY CAR AND AM GOING TO THE STORE.”

After this he made some kind of growling noise and drove away. The yarn store trip was not so successful, since the lady clearly did not want to help me with my dropped stitch and chided me for not knowing how to do it (“You know, someday you’ll need to learn to do this yourself.”) She determined that the dropped stitch was unfixable and sent me home. I went home, worked some internet magic, and fixed my knitting myself.

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After months of hiatus, I’m back on the blogging train. Watch out, the internet.